Debates Republicanos En Chile

In recent years, a dedicated group of Chilean historians has sought to bring greater international visibility and recognition to Chilean history, especially the history of the early republic. Ana María Stuven and Gabriel Cid, the editors of this book, are key members of that group. Stuven and Cid share a base of operations in the Programa de Historia de las Ideas Políticas en Chile, which is part of the Department of Social Sciences and History at the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago. The publication of Debates republicanos en Chile should be seen as part of a larger effort by Stuven, Cid, and other Chilean historians to place their country's experience more prominently within the larger regional history of Latin America and the Atlantic world.Debates republicanos is a hybrid book, part interpretive essay and part primary source reader. It contains an introduction by Stuven and five chapters based on the following concepts: sovereignty, representation, republic, federalism, and order. Each chapter contains a lengthy introductory essay, a suggested bibliography, and a collection of excerpted primary sources. This is only the first volume of a work that, as the title suggests, will cover the entire nineteenth century. As such, this volume is highly concentrated in the 1810s and 1820s, the period of political independence and immediately thereafter. Much of the thinking that Stuven and Cid put into this volume results undoubtedly from their extensive publication efforts during the commemoration of Chile's bicentennial in 2010.Stuven and Cid approach their subject from the perspective of the history of ideas, especially political ideas. One of the main influences on this perspective is the group Iberconceptos, a transatlantic network of scholars who work on the history of political ideas in the Spanish-speaking Atlantic world (Stuven is coordinator of its Religion and Politics Group). Deeper influences come from the Cambridge School of intellectual history, famous for its historical contextualization of political ideas and theory, and La République des Idées (The Republic of Ideas), a scholarly working group founded by French political historian Pierre Rosanvallon.This history of ideas approach allows the editors to delve deeply into a wide range of ideas. The way they have organized the book allows the reader to develop familiarity with some of the individual writers and politicians of Chilean independence, such as the Enlightenment priest Camilo Henríquez, the Guatemalan-born Chilean patriot Antonio José de Irisarri, and the fervent federalist José Miguel Infante. Think of Simon Collier's classic Ideas and Politics of Chilean Independence, 1808–1833 (1967), but a version that allows Chilean writers and statesmen to communicate with you directly for long stretches. The high quality of the political thought revealed in these chapters confirms the editors' assumption that the history of republican political thought in Chile is comparable to that of Mexico or Argentina, not to mention France, Spain, or the United States.The approach also allows Stuven and Cid to identify a number of key moments in Chile's independence struggle and its aftermath. Such moments occurred when political debates took on a definitive feature, shifted points of emphasis, or became emblematic of a larger trend in transatlantic political discourse. One of the moments that stood out to me came during the meeting of the Cádiz Cortes (1810–1814), at which time Henríquez, Irisarri, and others in Chile published detailed arguments in favor of greater American representation in that body, demonstrating that they were already working out plans for electoral representation and organization in Chile.One problem with this approach is that it largely leaves out the political activities that occurred between these key moments. We do not get a clear picture of how the political field was shaped by the actions of men interacting with the changing institutions of the state. Bernardo O'Higgins is discussed because he left behind writings and proclamations, but José Miguel Carrera is left out; José Miguel Infante gets attention for his writings and congressional speeches, but Francisco Antonio Pinto is hardly mentioned. I was happy to see the ideas of the radical printer Santiago Ramos included, but, oddly, there is not a single mention of Diego Portales, even in the chapter on order, the only chapter that extends into the 1830s and 1840s. Thus the process of how we go from the Patria Vieja to the Patria Nueva or from the Constitution of 1828 to the Constitution of 1833 is not really explained. We see only a reflection of that history in the mirror of political ideas.Nevertheless, that reflection is absolutely essential to grasping the significance of Chilean political thought in the history of the wider Atlantic republican world. This book delivers on its promise to raise the international profile of Chilean political thought in the nineteenth century

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